


That's a Stupid Superpower

by AshToSilver



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gotham is completely crazy, Multi, Super-Sanity, it's probably something in the water
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2013-08-04
Packaged: 2017-12-22 11:02:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/912432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshToSilver/pseuds/AshToSilver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Think of it like the next generation of human beings.” The Joker purrs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That's a Stupid Superpower

**Author's Note:**

> This story is based upon Grant Morrison’s idea that Joker has “super-sanity”. It’s an alternated brain disorder that causes you to be unable to control sensory information and results in a person creating identifies for themselves to handle. (more explained in quote and throughout)
> 
> Where Ugly Was a Color is still underway, I just have major writer’s block. So here’s an unrelated oneshot!
> 
> The Arkham logo mentioned is from Batman: Arkham Asylum (video game) and is two capital A’s kinda put against each other to form a diamond shape? Also I used a map of Gotham for _all the fucking street names and districts_. All of them. I used an old map – you can google it if you want, or message/comment and I’ll send you a link to the exact one I used. Quote below is from a graphic novel.
> 
>  **EDIT Aug/2016:** I have changed my username, I am now going by AshToSilver on AO3 and [my new Tumblr](http://ashtosilver.tumblr.com/)! You can still call me Alex, but I no longer have a day of the week in my name.

“The Joker's a special case. Some of us feel he may be beyond treatment. In fact, we're not even sure if he can be properly defined as insane. His latest claim is that he's possessed by Baron Ghede, the Voodoo loa. We're beginning to think it may be a neurological disorder, similar to Tourette's syndrome. It's quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here. A brilliant new modification of human perception. More suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century. … Unlike you and I, the Joker seems to have no control over the sensory information he's receiving from the outside world. He can only cope with the chaotic barrage of input by going with the flow. That's why some days he's a mischievous clown, others a psychopathic killer. He has no real personality. He creates himself each day. He sees himself as the Lord of Misrule, and the world as a theatre of the absurd.” ~ Dr. Adams (Joker’s therapist) from Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth

* * *

They call it being _infected_ , but that’s not really right. Infected implies a disease.

This starts in the womb; it cannot be transmitted. It grows in the mind; it cannot affect the heart.

It is an evil unlike any seen before.

It is the inability to care.

O-O-O

The Joker courts The Batman from Tricorner to Robbinsville, across Newtown, Upper East Side and the Diamond District. They dance across Old Gotham and Coventry. They give gifts that are bloody and cruel, they bite and snatch at each other, they burn with obsession, and they take the night as their own.

It is not love as the rest know, it has no affection or temperance. If anything, the viciousness in them is brought forth tenfold when they are in each other’s presence.

They can be slow, if they wish it, circling each other above harbors and docks, exchanging words instead of blows. They can be tender with each other’s wounds, can recognize when the world sours the other’s mind, what days are not good days to fight.

They breathe each other; wait on dreams and thoughts between each meeting. In other lives, perhaps they would have fought together, for or against crime, maybe worked in offices or in schools. They might have married or had children, laughed and smiled in Grant Park or along Finger River.

In other lives, the world would have known, and perhaps it would have cared or perhaps it would not have.

In this life, they do not concern themselves with these ideas. In this life, they fight.

And in their brawls, their battles and their wars, against each other and against the world, they take Gotham for themselves, until every street has heard their battle cries, until the very buildings themselves hold the marks of their history.

They rule, as only kings can, above a city shrouded in darkness, full of crazy obsessions and crazy people. And they would never have it any other way.

O-O-O

“I’m not _crazy_.” He says it like Bruce has slapped him, wounded and hurt, though it never reaches his eyes, never extends through his posture. The Joker’s sitting on the unfinished beans and boards that will become another factory or warehouse; swinging his feet in the cool night air, gloved fingers tapping a tuneless rhythm against the steel.

Bruce ignores him, focuses on the comings and goings of various nighttime prowlers. Somewhere throughout history, Gothamite citizens had begun to abandon the standard hours. In the years since he’s become the Batman, he’s been noticing how much the city has become open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Somehow, it seems, nobody in this city sleeps more then a few hours a night, if that.

There aren’t many targets, mostly pickpockets and petty thieves looking for a quick steal, ones he easily scares off by causal pseudo sneaking around in plain sight, sending most of them scurrying back to wherever they came from.

Joker chuckles softly as he spooks another, leaping from the construction site to the Tricorner Yards’ main office and sending a young mugger fleeing. “You know, you may get better results if you walked around the crowed streets like that. If not; at least some kids may believe it when their mothers say their faces will get stuck really weird.”

“Did you just insult my face?” Bruce asks, because his target is taking his sweet time in arriving. His car has only just pulled into the parking lot.

“You just said I’m crazy!”

Bruce turns to give his nemesis a look. “You tried to set an aquarium on _fire_.”

“That is not a good measure of sanity. You dress like a bat. Clearly, you are not crazy.”

This brings Bruce to pause, still keeping an eye on his target. “Nobody who does what we do is sane.”

Joker pulls himself up and wanders over to peer around his dark knight at the ordinary man about to receive several thousand dollars worth of drugs.

“Oh Batsy, of course we’re not crazy. But we’re just… _differently sane._ ”

O-O-O

The idea festers in him, from their very first meeting. The first thing the jester ever said to him, was that they were alike, that they were the same – too good for the rest of the world, ahead of the game, however he phrased it.

And Joker kept coming back to it, over and over. He spread the words to the masses, one brightly colored voice amongst all the dim and darkness that was Gotham, calling that a new world order would appear, that not caring was _fine_.

Some days the message was one way – sometimes it was another. He was easily dismissed as crazy, dressed to the nines in borderline florescent colors and yelling strange phrases to anyone who was unlucky enough to get close enough.

Batman got close enough, dared to yearn for his clown to return. Joker’s words, first strange against his head had become a comfort, as if for a moment Bruce could believe everything _would_ change, whether for the better or worse though, he wasn’t sure.

Then the idea began to solidify.

The jester’s doctors said it best – it was a theory proposed by the discredited Harleen Quinzel at first, but it became more popular the longer he lingered in Arkham.

“Perhaps, he isn’t truly insane at all.” Said one, an evening that the Batman visited to check that everyone was still there and behaving. He often took this chance to note the clown’s medical progress or regression. “It’s more like his mind has taken on a state of extreme adaption. Everything he needs to do to survive in any situation he can do.”

The doctor shuddered. “It’s quite amazing if you think about it – but frightening too.”

Somewhere behind closed doors, the clown cackled, his trademark sounds echoing off the hospital’s walls.

Batman shudders too, because the clown’s in his head too, like a ghost whispering that they are the _same_.

He leaves without comment, mostly because he can.

O-O-O

But as time goes on, he begins to see traits of it inside himself.

He sits on his bed in Wayne Manor, watches the sun rise and stares at his wardrobe full of expensive clothes. Each one is tailored for Bruce Wayne, designed with richness in mind. He wonders if Joker’s whispers are true, if even the identity he presumes during the daytime is just another mask.

He dresses himself and feels another being slot into place, the person he needs to be today.

Something, deep within him _screams_ that the Joker is right, that he _is_ like him, that everything he ever could be was created on a whim by a brain not completely sane.

But he ignores it, feels no fear or sadness for this knowledge.

Because he is exactly who he needs to be.

O-O-O

He tries to explain it to Joker, one night where fighting isn’t on the menu. They’ve tussled and tumbled already, ending up twined around each other, staring over the streets and enjoying the other’s warmth.

The troublemaker just chuckled lightly at his mumbled words. “Batsy, don’t worry. It’s just the new way.”

“Can you be sure though?” He stresses, knows Joker never does, but this is one of the few places they are just a bit different. “How can you tell?”

And the Joker leans in, pale face bright in the dark, hands soft against his own and rests his head against the vigilante’s shoulder. “Because we’re not the only ones.”

 _Oh._ Thinks Bruce. _I can live with that._

O-O-O

“I think Spooky may be infected.” It’s a phrase the Joker uses a lot, one which frights most people, makes it sound like its transmittable, even though there is no vaccine or cotangent.

“He still gets scared though.” Bruce is here near dawn, watching over the clown as he hacks during the annual flu season’s asylum plague that’s circling. He’s made three escape attempts in two days, and needs to be in the infirmary for seven more hours. It’s basically a glorified babysitting job, but crime’s been going a bit slow and he enjoys the talking.

“I don’t think everyone’s got it to the same amount.” Joker manages to say between coughs. Something about white skin seems to make even the slightest illness look like death warmed over, and he looks miserable enough to match it. “You’ve still got bits of guilt and remorse, Spookster’s got a lot of fear.” He pauses for a moment. “I’m wondering about Flowerbutt too – I was kinda iffy on it for a while, but nobody detaches themselves from their entire birth species like that. Not unless you’re like us.”

“What about the others?” Bruce runs through a list of the villains and supercriminals he’s fought over the last couple of years. “Edward? Jervis?”

The Joker just shakes his head and then groans at the headache. “Eddie’s just a narcissist, there’s too much emotion there. And Jervis is close – but all his delusions and made-up crap is about love and happiness, more or less.”

Bruce nods at this. “Have you tried talking to either of them about it?”

“I’m waiting for the right time.” The clown mutters, the last bit caught with a yawn.

O-O-O

It’s probably another year after that when at last he begins to see it around him everywhere. This is probably only because the generation born slightly after his and the Joker’s begins to hit teenhood, and the explosion of senseless crimes and indifferent children is all over the street corners and the news station.

They call it an epidemic; blame it on video games, drugs and bad parenting, even the villains themselves. One night the Batman drags Joker to a squad car in front of a bunch of cameras, and a reporter yells a question at the clown, asks if he’s been influencing kids who’ve watched his crimes on TV over the past half-decade. The jester laughs so hard he rolls around on the ground near Bruce’s feet, while the dark knight does his best to look bored and disinterested. He ends up manhandling the breathless criminal into the car while Gordon sighs and slams the door behind him.

The reporter just looks confused, unsure how her question wasn’t legitimate.

O-O-O

He begins to be approached by youth at some point – not as the robins did, because that is an experiment he considers a failure. Sooner or later they all left to do their own thing, and he can’t bring himself to care that much.

“The Joker says you’re like him.” They almost always start out that way; uncertainty coloring their voices but it never reaches the rest of them. “I’ve read books, seen the TV shows – they say he is super-sane.”

Somehow, they all know what this is, they never ask questions about how or why – they just want to know what they can do with it. They want to know how to use it. They’re still kids, born with a mind that isn’t like anyone else around them.

At first he is unsure, but he agrees to get back to them once he can think best of what to teach them. He gathers names and numbers.

He shows them to the Joker, who for once, doesn’t laugh or act amused. He nods seriously. “I’ve been getting stuff too – even more then this. I told them I’d start spreading some noise through the grapevine if I had the free time at some point.”

It makes sense that most of them end up as criminals. They are too violent, too disinterested in rules to be held by any ideals.

“We have to do something.” Morals have more sway with him then they do with his jester. The need to do something for this children pulls at him.

“Why?” The Joker just stares at him, trying to understand desperately what Bruce is telling him. “Why should we help?” And it isn’t angry or amused, just interested. He doesn’t have an answer but he wants one.

“Think about your life – your choices, your problems.” Bruce tries. “Would you honestly want someone, who thinks like you, who acts like you do, to end up like you?”

And he can see it in the Joker’s eyes. The idea that if he had a chance, even the smallest, to truly do things differently, he would have done that.

“Where do we start?”

O-O-O

And it starts, oddly enough, with Pamela and Jonathan.

Because Bruce has been watching them, working with them, and he knows they are infected as well. Jonathan less then Pamela by a long shot, perhaps even less then him, but they don’t exactly have a lot of adults to work with here.

He sits the four of them done one night, when there aren’t any tips and Gotham can survive one night without him.

He has to explain more of it then Joker does, mostly because he gets carried away and the point is to get them both on their side.

They are more willing to listen then he thought they would be – perhaps mostly because Pamela is down with anyone willing to work with her, not against her, and there is a look in Jonathan’s eyes like he’s realizing after many years, there are people out there like him.

“But how do you explain this?” Pamela hisses. “Where does it come from?”

“Think of it like the next generation of human beings.” The Joker purrs.

“Evolution doesn’t work like that.” Jonathan counter-argued.

“Evolution hasn’t been under this much stress before.” Batman says quietly, and that shuts them up. They know what this is about.

There’s a pause as they work it over, and then;

“This is a lot more difficult then telling a bunch of kids who to construct personalities, or control their obsessions or even use their skills.” Jonathan says, his fingers twitching on the rim of his glasses. “You’re trying to organize people who are the very definition of unorganized.”

Pamela scowls at him. “You’re thinking about it too complicated. Keep it simple.” She turns to Bruce. “Give them a symbol, an image to make their own. That’s what we did.”

And it’s as easy as that.

O-O-O

Coming up with a symbol is harder. He spends more time then he wants to admit thinking about it, even passes the idea around with a few of the kids he’s in regular contact with.

Joker takes to drawing images and signs on every available surface with everything from ketchup to stolen crayons. There’s a brief panic at Arkham while the doctors think it’s a new plot that he’s leaving clues for, but as the weeks go on, nothing comes from it.

They argue about it one evening when he drops by their rec room. There are tons of villains that seem content to ignore their new little club, though some wander over. Edward seems to have caught on to what this is about, and after being informed that he did not qualify, took to crashing their meetings with a pissed look on his face. It figures that he’d be upset about not being cursed with what can be chalked up to society-wide brain damage.

This time, the Riddler is wrapped around Jonathan’s thin formed, looking at the hundreds of sketches that Joker’s produced, and that the rest have hidden. They dismiss most as too complex, too meaningless and a multitude of other reasons.

Edward just scowls at their words, takes the pen Jonathan’s been twirling and draws a narrow diamond shape on some spare paper. “There – simple, distinct, clever enough that your smart little evolution brains can tell the difference based upon angles, metaphorical because diamonds are the toughest material known to man, etc, etc.” He pauses at their silenced expressions. “Plus it looks a bit like Arkham’s double A logo – and this is where it all started, isn’t it?”

They go with the diamond, and Joker mutters that this doesn’t mean Edward gets an honorary position.

O-O-O

Bruce doesn’t think that its fair that he has to be the one to tell Gordon, no, the diamond was not another gang symbol.

Within days of running the idea past their followers, it had blossomed everywhere, from chalk markings on sidewalks, to being spray painted on the side of buildings. The first week he sees it a couple of times a night  - but the time about a month passes, it’s a couple of times an hour.

Gordon seems to be very on the fence with the whole thing. His desire to fight crime wars with what his heart knows – they are soldiering onwards in a losing battle.

“You do what you have to do.” He whispers to the Batman. “Just try to keep them safe.” And Bruce just nods in agreement, and gives Gordon the satisfaction of watching him go, just this once.

O-O-O

Somewhere along the line – and perhaps it’s a year or two after they form their little league of the super-sane. Their ranks have swelled to several hundreds, becoming an intense network of rogues, young adults and teenagers. There’s even been some toddlers at the last couple of big meetings – wide-eyed, calculating, silent babies nestled in their siblings’ arms or clinging to strangers’ legs.

Across the city, from the richest meetings to the poorest districts, they weave themselves into a net, catching their falling brothers and sisters. They teach and learn, train and practice, honing their minds and bodies.

Somewhere along the line, Gotham begins to understand.

There is no name they can place, no cure they can give. The city becomes divided – the vast majority don’t care and won’t in the future. They’re ordinary human beings pushed to the point of numbness, the parents of the first super-sane. The darkness from which this new breed was born. The rest are strangers in a strange land – caring people in a place that doesn’t care.

Gotham becomes violent, it becomes dark, swallows people whole into this place, where none escape.

Those that have the foresight to, leave. Movie stars and the homeless alike, driven by something they can’t name, they get up and leave, find places where humanity still dwells.

The rest stay. They welcome the silence, in this place that never sleeps, lights on at all hours. Crime drops, but they begin to squabble amongst themselves. The youth that started it all have grown – and they pair off, pick people with similar obsessions to their own, and _fight_.

They fight like Batman and the Joker. Hopelessly bound, desperately in some twisted version of love. Bruce can see it in the way they lean towards others, how they look and talk. This is a world built on nobody and everyone all at once.

O-O-O

The Joker once says to him, on the night that Bruce removes his mask for the first time, as they lay in Wayne Manor and watch the fog hide the sun, that love is obsession and dependence. An off-shot of the most basic desire the super-sane hold; to obsess over something. But it comes with a trait found nowhere else in their ruined minds, and that is the need, the soul-crushing need, to rely on another, if only for an hour, a night.

Bruce believes him, because he loves him back.

He can’t live without him anymore, especially not where the world is going.

O-O-O

Obsession is this generation’s problem, but it isn’t the next’s.

Jonathan, who leads the section of their club’s little neurological scientist division (the fact that this many people can be scientists – another trait they all share – is amazing), says that they are still in the progress of evolving.

The first generation – the villains and the vigilantes, needed that obsession to build their base – to drive them to establish themselves. The second needed the paranoia to protect it and give their children time to build.

“Mother nature is fascinating like that.” Says Pamela one day, to a doctor in Arkham, but really to Bruce, who she knows reads their medical reports. “It is capable of giving something exactly what it needs, but no more.”

The second generation is paranoid. And it’s a fucking pain to deal with.

O-O-O

Arkham gets shut down seven years into the Batman’s crusade, and he’s honestly surprised it took this long. What’s left of the do-gooders in Gotham wail about how it was an abomination to mental health services everywhere.

They also complain about the mass breakout that causes almost every patient to spill into the streets one early morning.

Most of the ones lost in their own minds get picked up by the police quickly enough – then shipped off to greener pastures somewhere else, outside the city in different places. Others vanish, to never reappear in all the years that Batman does what he has to do (and he thinks, that is wise, to start up somewhere else where this craze has not rooted itself so firmly to the soil).

Others become elusive criminals, foes he or others take on over time.

Some join their cause.

He visits Arkham a few weeks after it’s condemned. In the old rec room sits his partners; Joker, Poison Ivy and Scarecrow. And seated on the couches to watch what goes down is Harley Quinn, Riddler, Mad Hatter, Two-Face, the Ventriloquist and oddly enough, Catwoman.

“I’m thinking this’ll make a good base of operations.” Purrs Joker, tossing some bouncing stress-ball into the air causally.

“This’ll get harder.” He tells them. “You’ll be running from the police.”

Riddler smiles on the couch. “Thankfully, we’ve got a bit of experience doing that.”

O-O-O

It’s not that the others work with them. It’s that the rogue gallery had just formed some sort of weird bond over time, and somehow feels obligated to help out in strange, roundabout ways.

Arkham does become a headquarters of sorts – some filled to the brim with makeshift labs, endless electronics and the sleeping forms of every infected running three days on three hours of sleep.

Harleen says it best, one night cuddling an exhausted Pamela.

“You gotta watch out for your family.”

O-O-O

Paranoia sweeps the city and the first thing they do is shut out everyone.

Not Gothamites – which is strange unto itself – but the rest of the world.

And it’s _everywhere_ that they hate. Stores selling foreign products see sales drop like flies. The farmer markets and flea markets practically explode. Their entire operation gets funded for a year on a week’s worth of sale of produce that Pamela grew and had some kids sell. National news suddenly can’t be found on the TV channels, and people switch their telephone companies to local businesses.

Nobody really complains, not until almost a year passes and they’ve cut themselves off enough to feel safe. Wayne Enterprises, which over the years has slowly become the main employer of most super-sane individuals who do work, is the only big company that makes the shift easily. The rest cling to their global offices and whine to their bosses about how Gotham won’t buy their made-in-china products.

Bruce buys up a dozen or so abandoned lots around the city and builds factories to produce everything Gotham needs – from clothing to food to medicine. Their sales rise, as other companies begin to move away.

Retail chains lay abandoned, their slaves instead getting jobs manufacturing or selling their own wares.

The vast majority of Gotham – most, almost all of it, in fact – existed in a very similar mindset to the infected spreading themselves into all areas of the city. The infected would start a trend and the rest followed.

(Which was really the opposite of what it meant to be super-sane – but they worked with what they had.)

O-O-O

“What has become of Gotham city?”

They’ve started to get old – faster then he expected they would. But he knows why, a life-time of fighting has caught up with him.

The Joker lies pressed against his side, just as battle-weary and nursing a sprained ankle from a police chase. They used to do this in the manor, but that’s outside the city limits now, the shores of New Jersey too far from their new world. Now his cave and all that remains of his family possessions have been moved to a new house built along Sprang River, not far from the shores of Arkham Island.

It’s been ten years – they feel the ache in their bones, the desire to spent whatever time they have left with each other.

The stolen satellite cable is running a news special based out of New York. They are still first generation, the most used to the world being right at their beck and call. Bruce runs his fingers through the pale green head of hair of his dozing nemesis and listens to them talk.

“You don’t hear about the Batman anymore, or any of their villains, or even companies or events!” One news reporter waves his hands in some sort of fake frantic display. His companion scowls. “Batman quit the Justice League years ago – that’s probably why nobody hears about him.”

“Yes, but do you ever hear _anything_ about Gotham anymore? Nobody visits to or from there, there are no reports-“

The TV clicks off and Joker rolls back over, dropping the remote and yawning.

“The rest of the world will check on us sooner or later.” Bruce whispers to his clown.

“Let them look.” The jester mumbles back. “Let them look at what we’ve become.”

O-O-O

The rest of the world doesn’t look – but that’s because what starts in Gotham spreads.

He wonders, was it actually infectious? Did someone leave, scared of what was happening, and birth more of their kind outside their safe walls?

The Joker is sitting next to him at the head of their new council chambers. The clown’s changed a lot in the last few years – used the skills they taught others to make himself anew. He’s wearing a white shirt loosely unbuttoned under a deep plum jacket, fingers ungloved and toying with a real diamond Bruce had bought him years ago, one perfectly angled and cut to appear like their symbol, a random find while shopping one day. It matches the homemade tattoo Joker did in the crease of Bruce’s elbow one faithful fighting night even longer ago, during the days they still dressed up and chased each other over rooftops.

Jonathan sits between Edward and Jervis, some of the few normal people allowed into these meetings, if only because years of chemical usage and the weakened state of the Scarecrow’s super-sanity had worn down more then it had on others, and the scientist finds his lovers comforting.

(That, and if it wasn’t for the Riddler, the city probably wouldn’t have cable or their own local version of the internet, or the computer system Arkham runs on, or even a working power plant. And that’s not even taking into account Jervis’s mind-control chips and their useful purposes on protecting the city from nosy outsiders.)

“There are reports from many of the world’s other more dangerous cities that have begun to match the ones we have on file.” This comes from a young teen, eyes on her clipboard. The third gen has begun to rear its head a bit, mostly displaying traits of extreme organization. Which was useful, because the second just hoarded information and never did anything with it, and the first mostly kicked people in the face.

“They’re developing super-sanity as well?” This comes from a man only entering into his twenties, one of the first to be picked up by the Arkham family. He borders between the two sets of traits, mildly unsure of the outside world, but mostly harboring the intense drive that got them here in the first place.

“They’re calling it a ‘superpower’.” Huffs another, displeased that people could get something so wrong. “That’s just stupid.”

“It would appear so.” Jonathan mutters, in a worn voice edged with age. He’s starting to get grey hairs even faster then Bruce is. “This is the new way of the twenty-first century. There _is_ a world outside of Gotham, and it marches on.”

The Joker gives a small chuckle. “Let’s see how they handle it.”

O-O-O

In other lives, perhaps the Joker and Batman would have retired to Otisburg or near Chinatown. They would have been bound in some way – as they are now.

But this binding is different then the other lives. Here they have taken on a family that spans hundreds, thousands, that leaked into the whole crazy system Gotham survives on.

There are always people wandering into their home, the house they’ve shared for years, where they’re broken plates and painted the walls ugly colors and argued over who gets what percentage of the basement lab. They’ve kissed here on new year’s and danced to bad rock music in the hallways. They’ve had toddlers draw on the walls and dogs chew their shoes, and even though each night when they go to sleep, they can see each and every scar they’ve dealt each other, they still love and still let strangers drop on their couches.

It isn’t some way to make up for all the wrong things they’ve done, or to be prized for all of the right things. It’s just something they did, making breakfast for more then just each other, because someone will wander in through a door that’s never locked to steal toast and pancakes and tell them who’s running which patrol and who got arrested.

Sometimes they are surrounded by old friends, from Gordon to Two-Face, and other times they are comforting strangers, who know them only as the ones who started it all.

It isn’t ideal – it isn’t what they imagined. But somehow it works to a point that all they can do is be grateful that years of stress and sleepless nights let them have this time.

O-O-O

It is fifteen years after it all starts, the first night that he puts on the mask, that he realizes Gotham is truly in danger.

The United Nations launches an investigation into this new breed of human, to find where it started, what caused it.

And they look to Gotham.

Noise begins to arise that Gotham won’t expect outside shipments – that it has no chain corporations operating businesses, that nobody leaves to visit other places, that nobody goes as a tourist. They find the bridges closed and barricaded, the city a strange beast of second-hand metal and modified buildings in the distant. They storm the skies with helicopters and planes and are shoo’d from every landing spot.

Gotham doesn’t have a mayor, barely has a police force. If anyone’s running a legal system still, it’s James Gordon and he’s grown old on the ideas that the world outside is to be avoided. Talks don’t go well.

They try to break in, and that’s when hell erupts.

Almost ten years, the Batman and his associates have had their ears to the ground, finding people to train. These people have organized and taught, fought each other in heated battles for the hell of it. A few military officers are no match for the combined training of the Batman and the Joker, raised on intellect like the Riddler’s and Scarecrow’s, the organization of Oracle, the sense of surroundings and environment given to them by Poison Ivy.

Their soldiers are ready to fight and the rest of the world goes into a frenzy.

O-O-O

“Is this how it ends?”

The Joker brushes his fingers over Bruce’s unmasked face, sitting loosely in the dark knight’s lap as they wait on the TV announcement to start that will cause talks to begin between the USA and the _thing_ that Gotham has become while nobody was looking.

Unmasked he may be, but he’s still dressed in armour, cape wrapped around them both. The character that was Bruce Wayne had vanished years ago, and the desire to hide him with it. The city knows. The city doesn’t care.

“Maybe.” Bruce says back, kisses the clown’s hand, pulls him close and lets the world outside them vanish.

“Batman, Joker. You’re on in five.” Gotham’s the only place in the world Bruce has ever known, where seven year olds help plan something like this. The little girl skips away to alert the stage managers and various other busybodies running too and fro.

“You ever think about having some of those?” The Joker jerks his head in the direction of the child.

Bruce smiles at him, a smile that the Joker had to teach him, but one none the same. “I think we’ve got plenty.”

“You’re right.” The villain sighs, getting up and brushing off the purple suit they made him just for this. “God help us, if we weren’t watching over our seven million babies. It’d be a catastrophe.”

“Three minutes!” Yells Pamela, dressed in one of the most beautiful dresses Bruce has ever seen, all curling vines and willow leaves. There are several small children running around her legs, staring in awe at the hovering leaves and lights that seem to grow right from her skin.

“Look at us!” The clown throws his hands into the air, causing the children to burst into giggles for no apparent reasons. “Absolute monkeys we are, dancing around on TV dressed like this.”

The children cackle and run off to play with someone else, and Joker just grins his trademark smile at Pamela. “Gettin’ soft are we, pollen-pal.”

“I was sort of hoping Bruce would have broken you of these terrible nicknames years ago.” The woman sighed. “Try to remember the script, Joker.”

The Joker spins to look at Bruce, whose just fixing the cowl over his head. “There’s a _script_?!”

“ONE MINUTE!” Shrieks Harleen, driving a foot into the back of her ex-lover and shoving him on stage.

“Nobody said anything about a script! Batsy!”

And Bruce just smiles. Nobody said anything about a script at all.

Things just turned out this way.

**Author's Note:**

> I… really don’t have much of an idea of what I’m doing with this. I may continue it later in other oneshots (I’ve got scenes planned for how Bruce gave Joker the diamond and Joker gave him the tattoo and my sister requested confused people with confused love triangles, so I want to write about how everyone deals with their relationship problems and threesomes terribly! Later)
> 
> I think I may write a bunch of oneshots over the next little while, mostly because I have a gazillion ideas and I’m trying to break through writers’ block. Also, I see a serious lack of contribution to this pairing. I’ve been stalking them a lot lately and _nothing_ , barely anything! (Granted, I haven’t checked on ff.net, but we’re not on speaking terms after I checked and the entire first page was 90% Joker x OC – not lying at all.)
> 
> Did you know on AO3, there are 184 Joker/Batman stories, which is terrible in itself – but it also includes all versions of Joker (comics included, not just movies!), and Jokester/Owlman and stuff? And yet, there are stories that don’t even include these guys (seriously – some people tagged other works that would have included them later, and then never updated). The story with the most hits/comments/kudos under this pairing isn’t even _about_ Bruce/Joker. It only includes it as a side pairing.
> 
> (On a slightly note, Bane/Blake has 186 stories and they were in _one movie_ and I don’t even remember them talking to each other. ??? And people say Joker/Batman is an overdone pairing)
> 
> ALSO, ALSO: If you guys have ideas or requests for AUs or anything like that, that’d you like to see, tell me. I have some ideas, but I just need to write random crap at this point. (No sex or really violent stuff, my sister’s 14 and is the only dedicated reader I have) Like seriously though – if you want to see like, vampires or Batman going evil or something, that’s cool, drop me a comment or message.
> 
> (Requesting does not guarantee I’ll get off my ass and write – they’re just nudging suggestions.)


End file.
